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Firefox 4 the Last Big Release From Mozilla

nk497 writes "Firefox 4 will be the last major browser release from Mozilla, as it looks to mimic Chrome's speedy release schedule — echoing previous statements that Firefox 7 would arrive this year. "What we want to do is get the power into users' hands more quickly," said vice president of products Jay Sullivan. "For example, the video tag was shippable in June — we should have shipped it." That new schedule is also why Firefox 4 has had 12 betas, he said. Mozilla also said future versions of Firefox would feature a stronger "do not follow tool", as the current one is a "non-technical solution"," Sullivan said. "All you're doing is raising your hand and saying 'I don't want to be tracked.' There's no technical teeth.""

7 of 236 comments (clear)

  1. Re:FF == the next Netscape? by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 3, Informative

    Are you sure you're seeing leaks? Firefox will use a certain % of free memory for cache. Just because memory goes up and doesn't come back down immediately doesn't mean the application is leaking. Mozilla's position would seem to be, and I entirely agree, that as long as you have the memory you might as well put it to good use instead of letting it waste away as free memory.

  2. Re:Plugin Support by bunratty · · Score: 5, Informative

    You should use the new JetPack API so you don't need to update your plugin every time a new version of Firefox is released. Better yet, release a plugin that tells all the other plugin developers to use JetPack.

    --
    What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
  3. Re:Plugin Support by Lucky75 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Geez, I've been on the FF4 beta for like 5 months now almost. IMO it's much better and stable. Almost all of my extensions work in it too.

    If your extension doesn't work with 3.6, edit your install.rdf file and change the MaxVersion to 3.6 (or wildcard)

    --
    DNA -- National Dyslexic Association
  4. Re:Ridiculous. by BZ · · Score: 5, Informative

    > What's wrong with that?

    It makes the lag to shipping new web-facing features and performance improvements too long. As a result you end up with situations like the current one, where Firefox 3.6 is significantly worse than the already-shipping competition (except IE8) in various performance and standards-compliance metrics... while the builds as of June of 2010, say, were much better than 3.6.

    This isn't about version numbers; it's about getting new features into the hands of users faster and not gating feature A, which is completely done, on feature B, which might get done sometime.

  5. Re:Bad Title by nicedream · · Score: 4, Informative

    The OP is saying that the way the headline is phrased makes it sound as though this is the end of the Firefox browser.
    "BSD is dying" is a meme that has been floating around for years.

  6. This mean the memory issues will get fixed? by OverlordQ · · Score: 3, Informative

    Before you say that since it happens to you it must be my addons, it[1] happens with 1 tab open to about:memory in Safe Mode. The only thing left to do is try a clean profile, but if a dirty profile can make an idle Firefox eat all your ram that's still a bad bug.

    1 - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636791

    --
    Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
  7. Re:#2 position-- mulit-core scaling by kripkenstein · · Score: 3, Informative

    And before someone chimes in and posts this saying that they're working on it, take a look again, that page hasn't been updated since May 2010.

    I am afraid that page is out of date, I edited the 'Status' section of it now - thanks for pointing it out!

    The status of multiprocess Firefox is that we have been working very hard at it, and made lots of progress. In fact Firefox Mobile is multiprocess already, you can run it right now and see that the UI remains responsive even if you load lots of tabs, JS heavy sites, etc. So that shows that rendering, networking, etc. etc. are ready for multiprocess.

    But getting desktop Firefox to be multiprocess will take more time, since there is a lot more stuff to support there, in particular addons, developer tools, etc. The plan is to finish that stuff later this year.